Fighting does Sill's body good

Kristen Mullen / The Citizens' Voice
Penguins' Zach Sill, left, collides with Monarchs' Jake Muzzin during a game last season.

For about five months of any given year, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins center Zach Sill avoids punching or getting punched by anyone.

Barring the occasional dust-up with his brother back home in Nova Scotia over summer vacation, there are no fights from the end of one hockey season in the spring through the start of another in the fall.

Thanks to an injury, though, Sill's break from the rough stuff lasted longer than usual this year.

His last fight last season came April 6 against Hershey's Kevin Marshall. Two games into this season, he suffered an upper-body injury that kept him on the shelf for 15 games.

That's why his first fight of this year, a Dec. 15 scrap with Syracuse's Mike Angelidis, was so significant. It gave Sill a chance to see how well his injury had healed.

"You always wonder how it's going to feel," Sill said. "When you come back for a new season, you always want to drop the gloves and get the feel of it, get the jitters out of it. I had to test it a little bit."

The test went well. Sill fed Angelidis some lefts, then fought Crunch defenseman Jean-Philippe Cote later in the same period. In the next meeting between the Penguins and Crunch last Saturday, Sill dropped the gloves with defenseman Jared Nightingale.

That all three of Sill's fighting majors this season have come against Syracuse shouldn't be a surprise. Since he joined the Penguins in 2009, he's always done the bulk of his fighting in the team's biggest rivalry games.

Of his 25 regular-season fights, 14 have come in I-81 games against Syracuse, Binghamton and Hershey.

STICK WITH IT

If Penguins goalie Jeff Zatkoff finds himself facing a breakaway after losing his stick in an upcoming game, he will feel right at home.

Earlier this month, Zatkoff was the loser of one of the team's post-practice shootout competitions. Usually, there are consequences of such a loss. A player might have to deliver sports drinks to his teammates after practice or grow a mustache or affix antlers and a red nose to the front of his car for a month.

Without going into detail, Zatkoff said he didn't comply with the conditions of his loss, so he faced a punishment imposed by his teammates. For the next month, he won't have a stick for the first round of shooters in the team's shootout competitions.

"It's amazing how awkward it is without a stick," he said. "It's more where to put your blocker than anything."

LOCKOUT TALK

Some observers - including at least a couple of players in the Penguins locker room - have thought there wouldn't be actual progress in NHL labor talks until the process faced a real deadline. Sure, nobody wanted to lose opening night, the Winter Classic or the all-star game, but negotiations wouldn't get really serious until the idea of canceling the entire season was close to reality.

That moment is fast approaching.

In 1994-95, the lockout ended in time for a 48-game season that began on Jan. 20. If that season can be used as a guide, expect talks to heat up in about two weeks.

HANGING AROUND

Led by Washington's Bruce Boudreau and Pittsburgh's Dan Bylsma, there was a stretch four or five years ago where AHL coaches were getting promoted to the NHL left and right.

The flow of that pipeline has slowed lately, as evidenced by the following stat.

With a 3-2 victory at Syracuse last Saturday, John Hynes took sole possession of the top spot on the Penguins' all-time coaching wins list with 116. But that total leaves him ranked just seventh out of 15 AHL Eastern Conference coaches in career wins.

Jonathan Bombulie can be reached at jbombulie@citizensvoice.com or twitter.com/CVBombulie. His notebook usually appears on Fridays, but was moved to Wednesday this week because the team plays a rare Thursday game.

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